Pronouncing the word "vegan" (when the wrong pronunciation is right)

My sister, Annie, lived in the Bay Area for many years but returned to Southern Cal about 10 or 15 years ago, upon which time she often hung out with my gang of friends, who, for various reasons, each had an interest in vegetarianism. (I and several of my close friends have been animal rightists for many decades.) In conversation, the concept of veganism often arose, and, for a time, Annie, a long-time vegetarian, insisted on pronouncing "vegan" as vaygun or vaygn, despite the relative commonness of veegun/veegn (again, with a hard g). 

"That's how all my friends in the Bay Area pronounce it," she complained. 

We just looked at her and said "it's veegun."

I did some research. In England in 1944, an animal rightist and vegetarian purist, Donald Watson, fundamentally an opponent of cruelty to animals, created a society dedicated to a strict vegetarianism. He then coined (or helped coin) the term "vegan" by taking the first 3 and the last 2 letters of "vegetarian." 

Naturally, this new term was pronounced vedge in or vedge an.

Who knew?

The evidence I have found indicates that, despite these origins, by the 1970s, vaygun (with the hard "g"), rather than Watson's vedge in, was the common pronunciation (among American vegans), but, thereafter, as the notion of strict vegetarianism gradually achieved a broad interest, the vaygun pronunciation gave way to the veegun pronunciation, something well-established by the late 90s. 

We have here multiple examples of a very common linguistic phenomenon in which the "right" pronunciation is replaced by the much more common "wrong" pronunciation. That commonness makes the "wrong" one right, of course, since words are about communication and thus rely on agreement in usage. 

I did some websurfing, and I found a letter from a guy who reported: 

I've been vegan for over 30 years, with many Peers, and from the 70's through the early 90's, I never heard anyone pronounce it any way other than Vay gn. 

That's my two carrot's worth. 

Here's my two carrots worth: sometimes you need to throw in the towel on insisting that everyone use the "correct" pronunciation—namely, when the new and incorrect pronunciation crosses the line into extreme (nearly universal) commonness. The same point applies to the meaning of words, as in "begging the question." At this point, only a prig would "correct" someone for using the phrase "beg the question" to refer to "raising" an issue instead of, well, you know, arguing for some proposition in a manner that presupposes the truth of that proposition (circular reasoning). (This latter is the original meaning that still held sway when I was an undergraduate in the early 70s.)

I believe there are exceptions to such accommodation. I recall a lecture by visiting philosophy professor Frederick Will (this would have been about 1977), an elderly fellow (and father of George Will), explaining that philosopher/logician Charles Sanders Peirce's surname "should be correctly pronounced as 'Purse.'" 

Yep. Here, the commonness of the error does not remove its erroneousness. 

* * *

See Merriam-Webster

See also "The curious case of 'begging the question.'"

Re Frederick Will:

Professor Will became known in the 1950s as one of the leaders among philosophers working in the analytic mode in the theory of knowledge. He concluded in 1964 that his philosophical approach was flawed. This decision led him to abandon a completed manuscript of a book embodying the results of twenty years of work and to turn away from the received view of epistemology and its problems. In 1974 he published Induction and Justification, a book in which he criticized his earlier ideas and argued for a radical alternative. (See)

 

Meanwhile, in Britain, it was pronounced "VEEgn" already by the 70s

...Just in case you're into the "logic" thing